Addressable Space

SoP23 Research
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yeah when i used to actually draw

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perhaps this is out of scope for this work, but the talk made me curious about how digital representations of our physical environment shape our experience of navigating it. where and how i choose to go places is already heavily mediated by my screens — e.g. visiting a restaurant irl is usually preceded by visiting maps, yelp, their website, etc. online — and so our collective memory ends up shaping my understanding and expectations of the physical just like my personal memory might make a chain store familiar. so if the addressable spaces of online and offline attention are increasingly overlapping (w/ more AR to come, etc.), i’m curious where we might find them merging and/or competing.

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I’m going to discuss the UCSD Geisel Library in one of my upcoming artifact case studies as a building designed around that kind of a principle, though the architect I think came at it I believe from a different perspective more embedded in Modernist thinking. Interesting to hear that you heard of it from VSBA or maybe someone else with a similar kind of point of view (?), since I could see that being an argument more critical of modernism as a way of promoting designing for the human scale or something.

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That seems like a contributing factor with the caveat of thinking about how they gradually evolved over time (earlier medieval ones I think could be approached as somewhat of an extension of other masonry walls in the building), and how their importance would vary in different cultures. ie. in a Mediterranean climate the chimney would be less essential, but you’d have ventilation needs traditionally served by an atrium.

Makes me also think about the Russian stove (Russian stove - Wikipedia) as a chimney-esque heavy masonry structure which also superficially seems like it could be a relatively direct continuation of the pattern of a wooden house with a central cooking hearth.

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That’s interesting to hear. I think my focus on discontinuities in games evolved somewhat out of an earlier set of experiences I had with noticing moments in 2D RPG games where a house would be much larger on its inside vs. the outside, and with areas (also in some 1990s 3D games as well) where you’d travel to the edge of the game map and encounter an illogical border (like the impassable forests/random piles of boulders/oceans etc. you sometimes see at the edges of RPG maps) beyond which you couldn’t further travel. I want to do more research and writing about those spatial issues some time, once I find the right situation or platform to write about them.

But really the level loading discontinuity idea was overall an observation that was ultimately more detached from my own experiences with playing games; I started really noticing it when I was trying to make amateur games of my own and designing their levels. I also started to develop an idea while I was in architecture school to create a VR experience which would try to further draw attention to those potential discontinuities. But overall it’s definitely useful to hear confirmation about how I should be aware that it’s a theoretical issue more than one impacting the experiences of most gamers.

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It’s a very short gag in an episode titled “Worst Episode Ever”
1104603 640x480

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That’s the one! Pre-2002 non-zombie Simpsons really had an eye for distant future patterns.

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Doesn’t sound out of scope. It seems like a topic though which architects in general haven’t talked enough about because of how often those screens/other external media and literature aren’t a part of their scope of design work. I’d imagine both architecture and those other types of design could fit under the umbrella of user experience (not something architects generally engage with) though.

From within architecture, Venturi/Scott Brown may have referenced a relevant concept a little bit in Learning From Las Vegas (IIRC) when they talk about someone traveling on a highway and deciding which hotel to stay at after seeing a roadside billboard. Also discourses on how well-known blockbuster iconic landmark buildings (like Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao) are more often perceived through photos than in real life seem relevant.

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My favorite idea:

  • the “Cinematic Elevator” that replaces meandering through a free-flowing building with sharp “cuts” between each space via elevators

My favorite quote:

The more you focus on the dots and lines on a digital map instead of your surroundings, the more your travel starts to resemble an elevator ride. You bypass the experience of the spaces between your journey’s start and end.

I particularly enjoyed the final evocative image of taking an elevator ride and emerging in the Windows desktop clouds. TODO: try with AR in world’s tallest building!

A resonant follow-up:

  • the similarities of “flattening experiences” in the digital world (e.g. to bypassing your surroundings on a journey
  • other ways we lose resolution when we convert back-and-forth from physical & virtual worlds
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